Chapter 4: The Hunger Beneath the Person
When Riley tries to explain what is so compelling about Avery, the answers come easily.
Avery is funny.
Curious.
Warm without being fake.
The kind of person who notices things.
Avery asks follow-up questions instead of waiting for a turn to speak. Remembers details. Gets excited about strange little subjects. Has a way of making an ordinary conversation feel like the most interesting thing happening in the room.
All of that may be true.
Then Riley says something different.
“I feel more like myself around Avery.”
That sentence deserves attention.
At first, it sounds like another compliment.
Maybe it is.
But notice where the subject of the sentence changed.
Riley is no longer describing Avery.
Riley is describing Riley.
Around Avery, Riley is quicker. Funnier. More spontaneous. Less tired. Less responsible for everybody. More interesting. More sexual. More willing to say what comes to mind.
Around Avery, there seems to be another version of life nearby.
That does not make the attraction fake.
It makes it larger.
Sometimes we are drawn toward another person partly because of who they are.
Sometimes we are also drawn toward who we become in their presence.
And sometimes those two experiences become so tightly intertwined that losing the person starts to feel like losing access to that version of ourselves.
This is where the question of limerence becomes more complicated.
If Avery has started representing not just affection but aliveness, recognition, freedom, hope, possibility, and proof that Riley still has a self outside the routines of ordinary life, then Avery is carrying much more psychological weight than one relationship can reasonably hold.
Understanding that weight does not mean explaining the person away.
It means finally asking what the attachment has been asked to do.
Wanting people is not a pathology
Before we talk about unmet needs, we need to be careful with the phrase itself.
“Unmet need” can sound like therapy language for something defective.
It can also create the impression that emotionally healthy people should somehow graduate from needing other human beings.
They do not.
Humans are intensely social creatures.
Connection is not an optional luxury added after all the important biological needs are handled. Social connection is tied to mental and physical well-being across a very large research literature. Loneliness, by contrast, refers not simply to being physically alone but to the painful sense that the connection available to you is not meeting your social needs. 18
We need people.
We want to be known.
We want to matter somewhere.
We want somebody to remember what we said.
We want people whose faces change when we enter the room.
We want touch when touch is welcome.
We want laughter.
Witness.
Belonging.
Sex.
Safety.
Admiration.
Novelty.
Comfort.
Partnership.
Space.
Being needed can feel good.
Being chosen can feel good.
Being desired can feel very good.
None of those desires proves that something went wrong in childhood.
The mistake is not needing people.
The problem develops when one person becomes responsible for satisfying such a large concentration of need that their availability starts deciding whether life feels meaningful, whether you feel valuable, or whether you can settle inside yourself.
This is an important distinction because popular discussions of limerence often take one of two extremes.
The romantic version says:
You feel this intensely because this person is uniquely meant for you.
The psychological version sometimes says:
You feel this intensely because you are wounded and the person is basically irrelevant.
Neither is good enough.
The person matters.
Your history matters.
Your current life matters.
Your temperament matters.
The relationship between you matters.
Chance matters.
Timing matters.
The fact that another person happened to arrive during a specific season of your life can matter enormously.
We are looking for an explanation that is large enough to hold more than one truth.
The person can become a symbol
A symbol is something that carries meaning beyond itself.
A wedding ring is metal.
It is also commitment.
A childhood home is a building.
It may also mean safety, grief, family, humiliation, belonging, or everything you escaped.
A person’s sweatshirt is fabric until it belongs to someone you love.
Human beings are meaning-making creatures.
We do not experience people as collections of objective traits.
We experience what they represent to us.
Riley has been with Morgan for eleven years.
That history contains real love.
It also contains bills, illness, arguments, compromises, repetitive weekends, work stress, family obligations, repairs, groceries, disappointments, affection, loyalty, and hundreds of quiet days that were never designed to be exciting.
Avery enters without carrying any of that.
Avery arrives associated with conversation.
Humor.
Interest.
Possibility.
The lightness of not having fought about the dishwasher six hundred times.
That difference can become psychologically powerful.
Riley may conclude:
I feel alive with Avery because Avery is the person who makes me alive.
Maybe.
But another possibility is that Avery has become associated with a part of Riley that has been underused.
Curiosity.
Novelty.
Risk.
Erotic energy.
Play.
The wish to be known as something other than employee, parent, partner, caretaker, reliable one, responsible one.
The difference matters.
If Avery contains Riley’s aliveness, there is only one solution: get Avery.
If Avery reveals Riley’s hunger for aliveness, many more possibilities become visible.
That does not make the feeling less meaningful.
It makes the meaning more useful.
Person, symbol, need
This gives us the first layer of a framework we will return to later.
Suppose Riley writes:
Person: Avery.
That is straightforward.
Then:
What Avery has come to symbolize: freedom, novelty, being understood, another possible life.
Then:
What needs may be underneath those symbols: self-expression, play, sexual vitality, recognition, autonomy, curiosity.
Those columns are not interchangeable.
Avery may genuinely meet some of those needs better than other people in Riley’s life.
But Avery is not the need itself.
This distinction can be surprisingly difficult when limerence is active.
If you have felt emotionally starved for recognition and one person suddenly sees you with unusual clarity, “I need to feel seen” can rapidly become:
I need this person to see me.
Then:
I need this person to keep seeing me.
Then:
If this person stops seeing me, something important about me disappears.
The need started human.
The solution became narrow.
That narrowing is where vulnerability grows.
Being seen can feel like being given back to yourself
There is a particular kind of encounter that can become very powerful for people who have felt unnoticed for a long time.
Someone pays attention.
Not generic attention.
Specific attention.
They notice your humor.
Ask about something you care about.
Remember what overwhelms you.
Understand a reference nobody else catches.
Take an interest in a part of you that has been quiet.
Maybe you have spent years feeling like the useful one rather than the interesting one.
Or the stable one.
The parent.
The caregiver.
The employee who gets things done.
The partner who keeps track of appointments.
Then somebody looks directly at a part of you that has gone unseen.
That can feel enormous.
You may experience it as:
Finally.
Finally someone understands.
Finally I do not have to explain everything.
Finally I am visible.
The longing that follows may seem to be entirely about the person.
Sometimes it is also about not wanting to lose the mirror.
A mirror, in psychological language, does not mean someone who flatters you constantly. It means another person’s response helps you experience and understand something about yourself.
Human beings do this for one another from the beginning of life.
We learn things about ourselves partly through relationship.
We see our humor land.
Our care matter.
Our competence recognized.
Our ideas taken seriously.
Romantic relationships can become especially powerful sources of this reflected sense of self. Research has found that self-esteem can become responsive to important close relationships, including romantic bonds. 19
There is nothing inherently wrong with that.
The danger comes when your reflection becomes available in only one mirror.
Then any movement away from you can feel like disappearance.
The need to belong
Recent limerence research gives us one direct piece of evidence here.
In the 2025 study developing the Limerence Questionnaire, greater limerence was associated with a stronger need to belong—the desire to form and maintain meaningful social bonds. The same study also found associations with lower self-esteem and greater imaginative fantasy, although these were correlational findings and cannot tell us what causes what. 20
That last part matters.
Someone might hear “need to belong” and think:
There it is. Limerent people are just needy.
That would badly misunderstand both the research and ordinary human life.
Belonging is a fundamental human concern.
The interesting question is not whether you need it.
It is where you have learned to look for it.
Suppose Elena has friends.
A family she talks to regularly.
Coworkers who like her.
On paper, she is connected.
But she rarely feels known.
Her friendships are warm but surface-level. Her family talks constantly without talking about anything vulnerable. She works remotely. She spends long stretches alone. The people in her life would help if she called, but she almost never calls.
Then she meets Sam.
Sam asks unusually direct questions.
Elena answers.
Within several weeks, Sam knows things many of Elena’s longtime friends do not.
Suddenly the world feels different.
This is important because loneliness is not the same as having nobody.
You can be lonely in a marriage.
Lonely in a family.
Lonely in a group chat that never stops making noise.
Loneliness is about the felt quality of connection, not merely the number of contacts in your phone.
Research on loneliness has long emphasized that perceived social disconnection can increase vigilance toward social threat and motivate attempts to reconnect. 21
That does not prove loneliness creates limerence.
It does make one finding from the 2026 limerence study especially interesting: in its experience-sampling portion, limerent thinking appeared to vary with mood, particularly sadness and loneliness. 22
Again, we must resist turning association into destiny.
But the question becomes worth asking:
When does your mind reach for this person most?
Not just where.
Not just after what trigger.
When emotionally?
Late at night?
After an argument?
After being ignored?
When bored?
When successful but unable to share it?
When ashamed?
When lonely?
When life feels flat?
Sometimes the timing of the fantasy tells you more than the content.
The person who makes life bigger
Belonging is not the only need that can gather around a person.
Sometimes the hunger is expansion.
Psychologists studying close relationships have developed what is called the self-expansion model. In plain language, the idea is that relationships can enlarge our sense of who we are by exposing us to new perspectives, experiences, skills, identities, and possibilities.
New relationships can be especially powerful because there is so much to discover. You enter another person’s world and, for a while, your own world becomes larger.
Their music enters your playlists.
Their friends become people you know.
Their interests become things you try.
Their stories change what you think about.
Their neighborhood becomes familiar.
You encounter yourself in unfamiliar situations.
This process has a large research literature, and newer reviews continue to find that novel and challenging shared experiences can benefit established relationships and well-being. 23
This gives us another useful way to understand why a new person can feel so extraordinary.
The experience may be partly romantic.
It may also be developmental.
Avery introduces Riley to a part of life that has gone dormant.
Maybe Riley once loved live music but stopped going.
Avery goes constantly.
Riley once wrote fiction.
Avery asks to read some.
Riley once wanted to travel.
Avery recently returned from somewhere Riley always wanted to see.
The mind may draw a powerful conclusion:
Avery is my way back to myself.
That conclusion contains a truth and a trap.
The truth:
Something in Riley wants expansion.
The trap:
Only Avery can provide it.
This becomes particularly potent when the rest of life feels narrow.
A long-term relationship can become predictable.
That does not necessarily mean it is bad.
Predictability is part of what allows safety.
But safety without novelty can become dull.
Responsibility without play can become exhausting.
A self made entirely of obligations can start to feel thin.
Then a person associated with newness can seem like oxygen.
If this is happening, the useful question is not:
How do I convince myself Avery isn’t exciting?
Avery may be exciting.
The useful question is:
Why did my life have so little room for this part of me before Avery arrived?
That question can eventually lead somewhere.
When being chosen becomes proof
There is another need that often hides inside romantic longing.
Worth.
Not abstract self-esteem.
Something more specific.
The fantasy that another person’s choice can settle an argument you have been having with yourself.
If Avery chooses Riley, perhaps that proves Riley is still attractive.
Still interesting.
Still capable of inspiring desire.
Still worth leaving something for.
Still special enough to disrupt another person’s life.
This can be particularly powerful when the desired person seems difficult to obtain.
Someone unavailable.
Ambivalent.
High-status.
Emotionally distant.
Already partnered.
Unpredictable.
A person whose attention is not easily won can become a more compelling source of proof precisely because their attention feels scarce.
If everybody likes you, one more person’s approval may not seem life-changing.
If the one person whose approval feels uncertain finally chooses you, the mind can attach enormous meaning to the victory.
That is one reason the fantasy may survive even when the relationship itself would probably be difficult.
The imagined prize is doing more than offering companionship.
It is resolving a question:
Am I enough to be chosen?
This can be an exhausting way to pursue self-worth because the evidence never stays settled for long.
Avery chooses you.
Relief.
Then:
But do they still choose me?
Would they choose somebody better?
Do they love me as intensely as I love them?
Am I still special?
If the deeper problem is unstable worth, one person’s affection cannot permanently solve it.
Not because affection is unimportant.
Because proof that must be repeatedly renewed never becomes proof.
Shame can make attention feel medicinal
Shame is another word that needs careful handling.
People often use shame to mean embarrassment.
They are related but not identical.
Embarrassment usually concerns something you did or something awkward that happened.
Shame reaches further into identity.
Not:
I made a mistake.
But:
There is something wrong with me.
Too needy.
Too strange.
Too emotional.
Too boring.
Too much.
Not enough.
Unlovable.
Unsuccessful.
Unattractive.
Defective.
If that belief is already active, another person’s admiration can provide extraordinary relief.
Someone wants you.
For a while, the verdict is suspended.
Maybe you are not defective after all.
This is why romantic attention can sometimes feel medicinal.
The person has not simply made you happy.
They have quieted an accusation.
When the attention disappears, the accusation returns.
Sometimes louder.
Then you may seek more attention partly because you want the person and partly because you want relief from yourself.
This can create a painful circle:
I feel unworthy.
Their attention makes me feel worthy.
Distance removes the relief.
My shame returns.
I seek reassurance.
If reassurance arrives, relief.
If it does not, shame intensifies.
Over time, the other person becomes increasingly responsible for regulating a problem they did not create.
We will examine that loop more closely in Chapter 6.
For now, the important point is that romantic longing and shame can become attached without romantic longing being reducible to shame.
You may want Avery because Avery is genuinely desirable.
You may also want Avery’s desire because of what it temporarily says about you.
Both can be true.
Childhood matters, but it is not the whole story
This is where many books would give you a clean origin story.
Perhaps you had an inconsistent caregiver.
Perhaps you were emotionally neglected.
Perhaps affection had to be earned.
Perhaps love was unpredictable.
Therefore, you became limerent.
It is an attractive explanation because it makes the past and present click neatly together.
There is some reason to take developmental history seriously.
The 2026 study of people reporting impairing limerence found elevated adverse childhood experiences and insecure attachment among participants, along with other forms of psychological difficulty. 24
That is meaningful evidence.
It is not a universal biography.
The study does not mean everyone with limerence was abused.
It does not prove childhood adversity causes limerence.
It does not mean a person with a warm childhood cannot become intensely fixated.
Development is rarely that tidy.
Early relationships can influence what you expect from closeness.
If care was unpredictable, you may become especially alert to shifts in availability.
If you were chronically unseen, recognition may carry unusual emotional force.
If criticism was constant, praise may feel like rescue.
If a caregiver was intrusive or controlling, distance and autonomy may matter as much as closeness.
If you learned that love could vanish suddenly, ambiguity may be harder to tolerate.
These pathways are plausible and, in the broader attachment literature, well studied.
But life keeps happening after childhood.
A secure person can become lonely.
A confident person can experience humiliation.
A satisfying marriage can deteriorate.
A parent can disappear into caregiving for ten years and barely notice until someone else asks what they want.
A person can move to a new city and lose their social world.
Someone can experience bereavement.
Illness.
Infertility.
A career collapse.
Menopause.
Divorce.
A child leaving home.
A frightening birthday.
A crisis of faith.
A period of isolation.
A sudden realization that the future now contains fewer years than the past.
Then another person appears.
Timing can become part of the chemistry.
Sometimes the current life is actually the problem
There is a temptation, especially in psychologically informed self-help, to interpret everything internally.
If you are obsessed with Avery, perhaps the answer must be inside your wounds.
Not necessarily.
Sometimes life is genuinely unsatisfying.
Sometimes Morgan has stopped being emotionally available.
Sometimes Riley has stopped trying too.
Sometimes the relationship is full of resentment.
Sometimes the job is unbearable.
Sometimes the friend group is gone.
Sometimes parenting has consumed every adult relationship.
Sometimes the sexual relationship has been dead for years and nobody talks about it.
Sometimes the person experiencing limerence has made themselves smaller for so long that being seen by somebody new is the first clear sign that something needs to change.
If Avery reveals that Riley is starving for conversation, Riley should take that information seriously.
But there is a crucial difference between:
This feeling is telling me something about my life.
and:
This feeling is telling me Avery is the solution.
The first can be profoundly useful.
The second may outrun the evidence.
Suppose Riley realizes:
I need more intellectual intimacy.
That is real information.
There are many possible responses.
Ask Morgan whether that part of the relationship can be rebuilt.
Deepen friendships.
Join a group.
Return to an interest.
Accept that the relationship with Morgan may no longer meet an important need and honestly evaluate what follows from that.
Any of those may be difficult.
But none requires turning Avery into destiny.
Limerence can sometimes function like a flare.
It lights up something in the dark.
The mistake is assuming the flare is the destination.
Autonomy can be part of the hunger too
Not every limerent attachment is about wanting to merge.
Some contain a strange hunger for distance.
If your ordinary life is crowded with obligation, another person may represent escape from being needed.
Avery does not ask Riley to remember the dentist appointment.
Avery does not need help finding the insurance paperwork.
Avery does not have eleven years of shared grievances.
Around Avery, Riley gets to arrive as an individual rather than as one half of a household system.
That can feel like freedom.
Psychologists use the word autonomy to describe the experience of acting with a sense of choice and ownership rather than feeling controlled or swallowed by demands. Self-determination theory treats autonomy, competence, and relatedness as basic psychological needs important to healthy motivation and well-being. 25
Notice that autonomy and relatedness exist together.
Healthy human beings need connection.
They also need separateness.
Sometimes a person becomes intensely compelling because they seem to offer both.
With you, I am close.
With you, I am also free.
Whether Avery can actually sustain that combination in a real relationship is another question.
Fantasy gets to promise both without negotiating the conflict.
Reality eventually has to negotiate.
There may not be one hunger
It would be convenient if you could identify one unmet need and solve the entire pattern.
Maybe:
“My core wound is abandonment.”
Then everything would become clear.
Human beings are rarely that efficient.
Riley may want recognition and novelty.
Security and freedom.
Erotic energy and emotional understanding.
To be chosen and to escape the demands of being needed.
Elena may be lonely, ashamed, and bored at the same time.
Someone else may have a stable life but be especially sensitive to uncertain romantic reward.
Another person may simply encounter someone unusually compatible at a moment when reciprocation is unavailable.
The goal is not to discover the secret wound behind your personality.
It is to become more precise about the psychological responsibilities this one person has gradually acquired.
Try finishing this sentence:
When they seem close to me, I get to feel ______.
Not what do you get from them.
What do you get to feel?
Interesting?
Beautiful?
Safe?
Young?
Powerful?
Hopeful?
Sexual?
Calm?
Chosen?
Understood?
Necessary?
Free?
Then:
When they seem far away, what disappears?
Those answers may tell you something important.
Not the whole story.
Enough to keep going.
Because needs explain why a person can become unusually significant.
They do not yet explain why the mind keeps returning to them every time uncertainty appears.
For that, we need to look at the loop itself.